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Overview

Moscow, 1980

The Communist countries held their own private Eastern bloc
party in 1980 because a number of nations boycotted the Olympics.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter refused to send American teams to
Moscow after the Soviets' Afghanistan invasion. Six other
countries that had qualified for the football tournament followed
suit -- Argentina, Egypt, Ghana, Iran, Malaysia and Norway. In
their place, as invitees and not qualifiers, were Venezuela,
Zambia, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Finland and Cuba.

Because of the many no-shows, many football observers did not
view these Games as a true Olympic Football Tournament. But
Czechoslovakia certainly did. The Czechs defeated East Germany,
1-0, on a goal by substitute midfielder Jindrich Svoboda, to
capture their first gold medal. Only four minutes after replacing
Werner Licka in the 73rd minute, Svoboda chipped the ball over
goalkeeper Bodo Rudwaleit and into the net.

Each side lost their playmakers to red cards in the 58th minute
-- the Czechs' Jan Berger and the Germans' Wolfgang
Steinbach. The East Germans did not have one player from their 1976
gold-medal winning team!

For the third consecutive Olympics, the defending champions took
home a silver medal and the final was played in the rain, in front
of a crowd of 80,000 in the Lenin Stadium. In fact, the crowd
totals were most impressive as an Olympic football record 1,821,624
spectators watched the 32 matches, or 35 percent of the total
attendance for the entire Games.

One of the big surprises was Algeria, who qualified for the
second round. They were led by Rabah Madjer, who scored the
game-winning goal for Porto (Portugal) to capture the 1987 European
Champions Cup against Bayern Munich (Germany), and Lakhdar
Belloumi.

The host Soviets, who were stunned by East Germany in the
semi-finals, earned a bronze after a 2-0 victory over Yugoslavia,
as tournament scoring champion Sergey Andreev (five goals) and
Khoren Oganesyan scored. But that was not good enough for their
fans, who whistled their displeasure at their heroes during the
medal ceremonies.